[Loic]

Take a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can achieve it.

[saalaa]

They have not reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing down and demand is only growing.

They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure).

They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig it out.

I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2 reduction goals of 2020 and 2030.

At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.

[hannob]

This is largely untrue or inaccurate. There has been a small uptick in lignite use for a couple of years, but it's been going down again. But that was not overall coal use, hard coal was in steady decline. The last new coal plant constructions were started in 2009. This was an unfortunate and wrong decision, but it's been a while ago. Most of the investors of these plants regret that decision, because they aren't needed a whole lot. That villages had to be removed due to coal mining is not something that's happening "these days", it's been happening for decades. However none of that has been decided lately. Goes all back to decisions made in the 90s. It doesn't make it better, but your comment makes it sound that this is a recent development. It's not. Recently some existing plans for lignite open casts were reduced and some villages will be saved.

Demand is not growing overall, it's been in decline for a couple of years (with occasional upticks, but that's to be expected).

Germany is the largest total CO2 source in the EU, but it's also the largest country. Per capita emissions are still relatively high though.

It's not all green in Germany, a lot could be better. I'm in full agreement that the huge lignite mines and plants are a terrible thing, but one should still stick to facts. But despite all bads a lot is going in the right direction.

[RGamma]

One of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of renewables (which might have no local greenhouse gas emissions, but are still dirty to produce/consume rare earths). Oh, and there are lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of euros ([1] says there are estimated damages in double-digit billions of euros overall) in denied profits going on.

I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our earthly power consumption problems once and for all...

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-m...

[sliverstorm]

For me, it was the ultimate example of environmentalists shooting themselves in the foot. Always opposed to nuclear (scary!), wind (birds!), natural gas (fracking! CO2!), and as a result we keep burning coal, the worst of them all.

[tobias3]

One also sees the little 1990 peak. That's when inefficient east-block power plants started to be turned off and be replaced by more efficient versions. Other countries did not have such an easy way to increase overall power plant efficiency.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, they're exporting their pollution to China and some of the other European countries, by switching to PVs and buying coal-produced electricity, respectively.